Hippocrates is commonly known as the FATHER OF MEDICINE. He believed that the human body had an innate ability to heal itself. I cannot help but ponder why it is we have ventured so far away from this ideal of Hippocrates…Let FOOD be thy MEDICINE! What a concept right!? Using the terms FOOD and MEDICINE interchangeably (Who would’ve thought)?! As a society, we have veered so far off this path that it has become almost impossible to remind ourselves of the importance of food.

I think back to my old (pre-nutrition enriched) self and am reminded of some of my old thoughts. I use to think of eating healthy as just a way to lose weight. I never really believed “You are what you eat.” I would go from one extreme diet to another. I even remember back to a time when I would eat a bowl of cereal for breakfast, an apple for lunch, and a bowl of canned green beans for dinner. At that time, I considered this menu to be a healthy one! After a few weeks of eating like that and obsessively exercising I was sick for a solid week or two. Yet still, it never fully registered with me that what I was doing was bad for me. There were even times in high school that I thought it was okay to only eat those fresh baked cookies at school for lunch. I said to myself, “I know these 2 cookies are bad for me, but if I only eat the cookies then that’s not too bad.” I’m appalled by my “old self” ways, but really I was just IGNORANT!

Nutrition has been put on the back burner in today’s society; we are not taught the importance of nutrition. We go from hearing about one fad diet to the next, or about the next quick fix for weight loss which never seems to work long term. A lifestyle change of eating right and exercising has the power to prevent degenerative diseases, cancers, obesity, aging, autoimmune diseases, psychosis, colds, flus…the list is endless!

Today, our society tends to laugh at holistic medicine and write it off as quackery. A “Pill for every Ill” has been the adopted motto of today. Headache, stomach ache, depression, can’t focus…No worries, there’s a drug for that! Does anyone ever stop to think, “What is in this drug that I’m taking?” or “WOW, this drug has over 20 dangerous side effects?” Each year, there are an average of 106,000 deaths due to adverse drug reactions. 106,000 deaths! And by no means am I hating on doctors, because they work wonders and save lives each and every day! But what I am saying is, first and foremost, you control what you are putting into your body. Less than 6% of today’s graduating physicians receive any training in nutrition. We need nutrition education instead of all of this medication. We have to be the change we wish to see in the world!

HEALTH IS A CHOICE!! Only you can take responsibility for your health which is why it can be a struggle sometimes. You have to make the choice to change your life!

Fruits and vegetables have crazy amounts of vitamins and minerals which equal healing power! YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. Think about it, if you were to plant a tree tomorrow and never gave it water or nutrient rich soil, it would NOT live for 100 years like you would hope and the same thing goes with our bodies! We have to start putting nutrients in and it is up to you to do just that!

I was amazed once I started researching fruits, vegetables, herbs, vitamins, minerals, etc when I found that for almost every pharmaceutical drug, there is a product of nature that has the exact same healing benefits, without the chemicals and those 20 odd side effects! Vitamins enable our bodies to heal itself.

Since I’ve adopted eating healthy as a LIFESTYLE and not as a “quick fix,” I have felt better than ever! In the past year alone, I have not been sick one time. I have not taken one pharmaceutical drug or over the counter drug (Yep, no Tylenol! Who would’ve thought that was possible?! haha)

Imagine the money you can save just by eating right and getting yourself healthy. No more/minimal doctor bills and paying for drug prescriptions.

Many of you that have known me for a while know that my entire life I have struggled with an awful “chesty” cough which pretty much lasted year round. I even have home videos at age two with evidence of the dog bark of a cough. We’re talking about a persistent TWENTY ONE YEAR OLD, YEAR ROUND COUGH! Once i started eating healthy, POOF! It was magically gone! This was a cough that had sent me from numerous doctors to pulmonary specialists; from one pharmaceutical drug to the next, but nothing had ever helped! Yet adopting a nutrient-rich, organic, plant based diet completely eradicated it! I am amazed each and every day of the power of eating healthy organic fruits and vegetables and the impact it can have on each and every one of us. I do realize it is impossible to eat organic produce 100% of the time, but try to go for the organic option as much as you can!

We are living amidst a SICK nation where annually there are:

650,000 Heart disease deaths

550,000 Cancer deaths

106,000 adverse drug deaths

Cancer and disease statistics have not drastically changed over the past five decades, therefore we need to try something NEW! The statistics for the healing powers of nutrition are out there, they have just been chosen to be ignored. While good health has been proven to work, it does not make a lot of money for the corporate world.

I’m going to leave you with this thought by Orthomolecular expert Andrew Saul, “We need a new paradigm..a whole new way of looking at things. We need to BOOST health with nutrition. It’s really the one thing we haven’t tried.”